The Fragile Fabric of Union

The Fragile Fabric of Union
Author: Brian Schoen
Publisher: JHU Press
Total Pages: 384
Release: 2009-10
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0801893038

Winner, 2010 Bennett H. Wall Award, Southern Historical Association In this fresh study Brian Schoen views the Deep South and its cotton industry from a global perspective, revisiting old assumptions and providing new insights into the region, the political history of the United States, and the causes of the Civil War. Schoen takes a unique and broad approach. Rather than seeing the Deep South and its planters as isolated from larger intellectual, economic, and political developments, he places the region firmly within them. In doing so, he demonstrates that the region’s prominence within the modern world—and not its opposition to it—indelibly shaped Southern history. The place of “King Cotton” in the sectional thinking and budding nationalism of the Lower South seems obvious enough, but Schoen reexamines the ever-shifting landscape of international trade from the 1780s through the eve of the Civil War. He argues that the Southern cotton trade was essential to the European economy, seemingly worth any price for Europeans to protect and maintain, and something to defend aggressively in the halls of Congress. This powerful association gave the Deep South the confidence to ultimately secede from the Union. By integrating the history of the region with global events, Schoen reveals how white farmers, planters, and merchants created a “Cotton South,” preserved its profitability for many years, and ensured its dominance in the international raw cotton markets. The story he tells reveals the opportunities and costs of cotton production for the Lower South and the United States.

Made in Britain

Made in Britain
Author: Stephen Tuffnell
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 317
Release: 2020-09-08
Genre: History
ISBN: 0520975634

The United States was made in Britain. For over a hundred years following independence, a diverse and lively crowd of emigrant Americans left the United States for Britain. From Liverpool and London, they produced Atlantic capitalism and managed transfers of goods, culture, and capital that were integral to US nation-building. In British social clubs, emigrants forged relationships with elite Britons that were essential not only to tranquil transatlantic connections, but also to fighting southern slavery. As the United States descended into Civil War, emigrant Americans decisively shaped the Atlantic-wide battle for public opinion. Equally revered as informal ambassadors and feared as anti-republican contagions, these emigrants raised troubling questions about the relationship between nationhood, nationality, and foreign connection. Blending the histories of foreign relations, capitalism, nation-formation, and transnational connection, Stephen Tuffnell compellingly demonstrates that the United States’ struggle toward independent nationhood was entangled at every step with the world’s most powerful empire of the time. With deep research and vivid detail, Made in Britain uncovers this hidden story and presents a bold new perspective on nineteenth-century trans-Atlantic relations.

Not Made by Slaves

Not Made by Slaves
Author: Bronwen Everill
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 329
Release: 2020-09-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 0674250079

How abolitionist businesses marshaled intense moral outrage over slavery to shape a new ethics of international commerce. “East India Sugar Not Made By Slaves.” With these words on a sugar bowl, consumers of the early nineteenth century declared their power to change the global economy. Bronwen Everill examines how abolitionists from Europe to the United States to West Africa used new ideas of supply and demand, consumer credit, and branding to shape an argument for ethical capitalism. Everill focuses on the everyday economy of the Atlantic world. Antislavery affected business operations, as companies in West Africa, including the British firm Macaulay & Babington and the American partnership of Brown & Ives, developed new tactics in order to make “legitimate” commerce pay. Everill explores how the dilemmas of conducting ethical commerce reshaped the larger moral discourse surrounding production and consumption, influencing how slavery and freedom came to be defined in the market economy. But ethical commerce was not without its ironies; the search for supplies of goods “not made by slaves”—including East India sugar—expanded the reach of colonial empires in the relentless pursuit of cheap but “free” labor. Not Made by Slaves illuminates the early years of global consumer society, while placing the politics of antislavery firmly in the history of capitalism. It is also a stark reminder that the struggle to ensure fair trade and labor conditions continues.

Outside in

Outside in
Author: Andrew Preston
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 297
Release: 2017
Genre: History
ISBN: 0190459859

These original essays exemplify how the transnational history of the United States is being written today. The authors offer fresh work that focuses on the circuits of border-crossing activity that Americans have inhabited, while still taking the nation-state seriously.

Journal of the Civil War Era

Journal of the Civil War Era
Author: William A. Blair
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Total Pages: 171
Release: 2013-03-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 1469608960

The Journal of the Civil War Era Volume 3, Number 1 March 2013 TABLE OF CONTENTS Editor's Note William Blair Articles Amber D. Moulton Closing the "Floodgate of Impurity": Moral Reform, Antislavery, and Interracial Marriage in Antebellum Massachusetts Marc-William Palen The Civil War's Forgotten Transatlantic Tariff Debate and the Confederacy's Free Trade Diplomacy Joy M. Giguere "The Americanized Sphinx": Civil War Commemoration, Jacob Bigelow, and the Sphinx at Mount Auburn Cemetery Review Essay Enrico Dal Lago Lincoln, Cavour, and National Unification: American Republicanism and Italian Liberal Nationalism in Comparative Perspective Professional Notes James J. Broomall The Interpretation Is A-Changin': Memory, Museums, and Public History in Central Virginia Book Reviews Books Received Notes on Contributors The Journal of the Civil War Era takes advantage of the flowering of research on the many issues raised by the sectional crisis, war, Reconstruction, and memory of the conflict, while bringing fresh understanding to the struggles that defined the period, and by extension, the course of American history in the nineteenth century.

The Revolution of 1861

The Revolution of 1861
Author: Andre M. Fleche
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
Total Pages: 219
Release: 2012-03-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 0807869929

It was no coincidence that the Civil War occurred during an age of violent political upheaval in Europe and the Americas. Grounding the causes and philosophies of the Civil War in an international context, Andre M. Fleche examines how questions of national self-determination, race, class, and labor the world over influenced American interpretations of the strains on the Union and the growing differences between North and South. Setting familiar events in an international context, Fleche enlarges our understanding of nationalism in the nineteenth century, with startling implications for our understanding of the Civil War. Confederates argued that European nationalist movements provided models for their efforts to establish a new nation-state, while Unionists stressed the role of the state in balancing order and liberty in a revolutionary age. Diplomats and politicians used such arguments to explain their causes to thinkers throughout the world. Fleche maintains that the fight over the future of republican government in America was also a battle over the meaning of revolution in the Atlantic world and, as such, can be fully understood only as a part of the world-historical context in which it was fought.

Imperialism and Expansionism in American History [4 volumes]

Imperialism and Expansionism in American History [4 volumes]
Author: Chris J. Magoc
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 2400
Release: 2015-12-14
Genre: History
ISBN:

This four-volume encyclopedia chronicles the historical roots of the United States' current military dominance, documenting its growth from continental expansionism to hemispheric hegemony to global empire. This groundbreaking four-volume encyclopedia offers sweeping coverage of a subject central to American history and of urgent importance today as the nation wrestles with a global imperial posture and the long-term viability of the largest military establishment in human history. The work features more than 650 entries encompassing the full scope of American expansionism and imperialism from the colonial era through the 21st-century "War on Terror." Readers will learn about U.S.-Native American conflicts; 19th-century land laws; early forays overseas, for example, the opening of Japan; and America's imperial conflicts in Cuba and the Philippines. U.S. interests in Latin America are explored, as are the often-forgotten ambitions that lay behind the nation's involvement in the World Wars. The work also offers extensive coverage of the Cold War and today's ongoing conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan, Africa, and the Middle East as they relate to U.S. national interests. Notable individuals, including American statesmen, military commanders, influential public figures, and anti-imperialists are covered as well. The inclusion of cultural elements of American expansionism and imperialism—for example, Hollywood films and protest music—helps distinguish this set from other more limited works.

Slavery and the Democratic Conscience

Slavery and the Democratic Conscience
Author: Padraig Riley
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Total Pages: 328
Release: 2016-01-08
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0812247493

Slavery and the Democratic Conscience explains how democratic subjects confronted and came to terms with slaveholder power in the early American Republic. Slavery was not an exception to the rise of American democracy, Padraig Riley argues, but was instead central to the formation of democratic institutions and ideals.

Empire of Commerce

Empire of Commerce
Author: Susan Gaunt Stearns
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
Total Pages: 269
Release: 2024-05-28
Genre: History
ISBN: 0813951259

A groundbreaking study situating the Mississippi River valley at the heart of the early American republic’s political economy Shortly after the ratification of the US Constitution in 1789, twenty-two-year-old Andrew Jackson pledged his allegiance to the king of Spain. Prior to the Louisiana Purchase, imperial control of the North American continent remained an open question. Spain controlled the Mississippi River, closing it to American trade in 1784, and western men on the make like Jackson had to navigate the overlapping economic and political forces at work with ruthless pragmatism. In Empire of Commerce, Susan Gaunt Stearns takes readers back to a time when there was nothing inevitable about the United States’ untrammeled westward expansion. Her work demonstrates the centrality of trade on and along the Mississippi River to the complex development of the political and economic structures that shaped the nascent American republic. Stearns’s perspective-shifting book reconfigures our understanding of key postrevolutionary moments—the writing of the Constitution, the outbreak of the Whiskey Rebellion, and the Louisiana Purchase—and demonstrates how the transatlantic cotton trade finally set the stage for transforming an imagined west into something real.

Contesting Slavery

Contesting Slavery
Author: John Craig Hammond
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
Total Pages: 337
Release: 2011-06-10
Genre: History
ISBN: 0813931177

Recent scholarship on slavery and politics between 1776 and 1840 has wholly revised historians’ understanding of the problem of slavery in American politics. Contesting Slavery builds on the best of that literature to reexamine the politics of slavery in revolutionary America and the early republic. The original essays collected here analyze the Revolutionary era and the early republic on their own terms to produce fresh insights into the politics of slavery before 1840. The collection forces historians to rethink the multiple meanings of slavery and antislavery to a broad array of Americans, from free and enslaved African Americans to proslavery ideologues, from northern farmers to northern female reformers, from minor party functionaries to political luminaries such as Henry Clay. The essays also delineate the multiple ways slavery sustained conflict and consensus in local, regional, and national politics. In the end, Contesting Slavery both establishes the abiding presence of slavery and sectionalism in American political life and challenges historians’ long-standing assumptions about the place, meaning, and significance of slavery in American politics between the Revolutionary and antebellum eras. Contributors: Rachel Hope Cleves, University of Victoria * David F. Ericson, George Mason University * John Craig Hammond, Penn State University, New Kensington * Matthew Mason, Brigham Young University * Richard Newman, Rochester Institute of Technology * James Oakes, CUNY Graduate Center * Peter S. Onuf, University of Virginia * Robert G. Parkinson, Shepherd University * Donald J. Ratcliffe, University of Oxford * Padraig Riley, Dalhousie University * Edward B. Rugemer, Yale University * Brian Schoen, Ohio University * Andrew Shankman, Rutgers University, Camden * George William Van Cleve, University of Virginia * Eva Sheppard Wolf, San Francisco State University